In the Ethiopian context, farm credit has been made available through public financial institutions of which
Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) and Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE) are the two major providers of
input credit (such as fertilizer, improved seed, herbicides, and farm tools). However, DBE sharply reduced its
supply of fertilizer loans in the early 1990s as its existence was threatened by massive default. Development Bank
of Ethiopia (DBE) stopped extending input credit since 1997. Currently the major sources of input credit are CBE
and some rural micro finance institutions.
There are 27 micro-financial institutions officially recognized by the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE, 2010).
These institutions deal directly with individual farmers who fulfill the loan provision criteria set by their
management. Though figures on the amount of credit they provide are not available, it is believed that these
institutions play an important role in narrowing the gap between the demand and supply of credit in rural areas.
The advantage of these financial institutions is that farmers can get loan in cash and use it to purchase the most
limiting production resources.
In order to increase loan repayment most of the micro financing schemes in Ethiopia provide loans to organized
members, who are not required to put up physical collateral but operate in a group mechanism in which risks of
non-repayment are transferred to the group. Essentially, most micro financing schemes in the country have, with
slight modifications, adopted the Grameen Bank micro credit mechanisms (Fantahun, 2000). Even if group
liability claims to improve repayment rates and lower transaction costs when lending to the poor by providing
incentives for peers to screen, monitor and enforce each other’s loans, the problem of poor loan repayment
performance persists.